Rating: 
Summary: Totally, Tenderly, Tragically
Review:
Camille: "Then you love me totally."
Paul: "I love you totally, tenderly, tragically."
Such is the story of Camille and Paul, whose lives we watch slowly unravel in tender tragedy. This is a movie to be watched and to be felt; to be understood by the part of you that has struggled to change an unchangeable love or the part of you that has felt the urge to desecrate your own life simply out of restless need to feel something new or understand something raw.
To begin with, Godard takes insoluble feelings of love/hate/restlessness/desire/contempt and weaves it under a thin layer of lives, which as you watch, cannot be seen directly but is clearly felt. He foregoes standard cinematic technique/storytelling criteria as he drops changing color filters over Bardot's introductory nude scene and compares the raging emotions of man against the widescapes of the still ocean and skies (as is seen in particularly breathtaking shots rotating around Greek statues with eyes painted in bright red against a backdrop of bluish white skies and a tortuous finale to which Godard himself yells "Silence!" and cuts to the motionless sea).
On top of this, the musical score done by Georges Delerue has been called the most beautiful score ever heard. It is repeated throughout the movie and it comes and goes unpredictably, like the asthmatic attacks that life often unveils at times not necessarily warranted. Altogether, this movie is an honest replication of feelings that course through all of us during the best of times and the worst of times.
Rating: 
Summary: Movie Sucks
Review: I am an enormous Godard fan, but for some reason Contempt has always struck me as being laughable and really quite amateurish. In the first place, it is just plain boring. Nothing happens, indeed, as other reviewers have noted. They add, however, that the drama is internal, as it usually is with Godard. Yes, but internal does not mean interesting. My Life to Live? Very interesting study of the internal. Contempt? It is so dreadfully monotonous--oh my heavens, and the score that just relentlessly shoots in every four or five minutes, over and over and over again--that even if the secrets of life and death were contained within its celluloid, I could not be bothered enough to stick around to see them.
Another reviewer compared this to an Antonioni film. I find that to be the truest thing said on this page, aside from the one reviewer who said "bin it." But that's because "Antonioni movie" is equivalent to "bin it", for me. Like L'Avventura, this film is monomaniacal in its pursuit of nothingness, and unfortunately, it succeeds so well that the film itself becomes simply nothing. I am unmoved by the analyses of the film because I am unmoved by the film. I will grant anyone that Godard was trying to get at some deep ideas here, and I will grant even that he succeeded incredibly. Antonioni did too, no doubt. But when a movie sucks, no idea can save it. How can I be expected to be led to deep waters when every time the score injects into the movie I burst out laughing in embarassment for the director? I swear I was so embarassed at the structure of this film that I blushed at times. It is the only B-movie that Godard was not able to turn into an A-movie. Instead, he achieves that unique thing that only brilliant directors can achieve: making a B-movie infinitely worse by giving it A-movie pretensions. YUCK!
Rating:
Summary: Brigitte Bardot's One Great Film
Review: (And how many times do you get to see Fritz Lang acting?) Perhaps Godard's most confident film, painting broad emotional strokes that ring true. There are some very adult questions asked here about love, power, and autonomy. The plot is simple, the tone is sophisticated and the performances are excellent. If you're looking for quality New Wave, you can't do much better.
Rating:
Summary: a man's duty
Review: A film about film making, how are the ancient- old myths translated in modern art, film in this case; what more than money does a Hollywood producer expect to get from film making; what is a man's duty towards his woman; is a writer, member of the (Italian) Communist party (in the 50-60's) prepared to work for an American producer for a "modern" version on the Odyssey, and how far can he travel along to twist the myth, in order to please the common taste, as the film producer suggests that it is...?After the WWII, American money helps destitute old Europe get up again; American money buys everything that glitters, Hollywood versus European cinema, American advances in Europe, that took the field of culture and art by surprise, as well. BB stands for the old ways, she is a woman for one man, and demands life to go on as before, her man to protect her from the alien man-- as Penelope would... Everybody is doing something other than his real mind and feeling, because of the paramount dollar factor... The man lets his woman open to the undisguised advances of the producer. The director is forced to succumb to the demands of the producer of how the film should look, and how the scenario should translate the myth; even the myth must be resolved in a modern psychological treatise about the adventures of sexuality.
Contempt feels the woman for her man, who lets her open and unprotected to the heavy take of the producer; the director for his ignoramus employer. And the new guy is measuring himself and his might against the grain and the ways of the old country. On this platform Godard translates an element of the Greek world in the film, the eternal unequal fight of man against god, where god is made in the image of man, but omnipotent. As even Zeus bows to Fate, at the end, the mismatched couple of individuals, producer-woman, meets unexpected death. If this is a tragedy, it does not solve, only underlines the conflicts. This is a "Greek" film, ravishing in beauty, challenging in the thought, and touching in a depth of feeling.
Rating:
Summary: Nietzsche, Luckac, Adorno, Godard.. gods are gone.
Review: A personal philosophical take on life, love and mostly a nihilistic presentation about Godards devotion towards filmmaking. Film and love (life) do not differ for Godard. The ancient gods, Ulisses was guided by fate, this was Homers presentation of the Greeks conception about life, when Greece was far by any comprehension, home to the most civilized society of mankind.
Today there is no god, today man IS god, today man lives off contempt. Something was broken and can never be restored. We lost fate, we lost god, we lost love. Today woman is goddess, beautiful as fragile. Men are gods, weak as true to their beliefs.
Godard poetically frees himself from his sedimented frustration towards the systematic approach of the nonsense, the invisible that purely resided in the beauty of the visible. Ancient tragedy is today's life.
Godard makes movies, and the derelict studios of Rome's Cinecittà where films (art - still full of contradictions) are made, may be our only way to fill the place of the lost gods, but what Godard is saying is that this is never going to happen. This can happen only in art, only in movies, in literature, in music, and again Godard makes movies: we are what movies are made from. Art is our only hope, it's our only journey to discover the invisible meaning of life, and in Contempt it does end with the infinity of the seas.
I'm afraid Godard was a little to far off for most of the people who did not grasp the human shattering meaning of this masterpiece. A pity.. but still, we do horribly live in contempt and its getting worse. isn't it so? and this was '63.. 10/10
Rating:
Summary: Godard and Lang, Bardot and Capri
Review: Bardot is actually an excellent actress in this film. Her body gets a lot of attention and there are plenty of shots of her lying in the sun naked but she gives her character depth. Strangley enough when she walks around wearing a black wig she looks very plain, not at all like a movie star. Perhaps the most striking thing about this film is that though it was Godards first color film he manages to use color brilliantly. The film was shot in Italy and reminds me of a Michelangelo Antonioni film as it is a story of two lovers who fail to communicate and thus let their love slip away. Jack Palance is perfect as the headstrong producer who manipulates his director Fritz Lang (who plays himself), as well as his writer (Michel Piccoli). Palance is the ultimate megalomaniacal producer who enjoys dominating others and manipulating them into doing whatever he wants. The confident and poised Lang acts like the master that he is, he never loses his cool and he copes with Palance's outrageous tantrums as if they were nothing at all, and we can see that despite Palance's constant intereference Lang will make the film that he wants. But the young, sensitive writer is made to feel like a whore. And this explains why he begins to treat his wife like a whore. Piccoli does not seem to want to admit what he is doing but he seems to push his wife into the arms of Palance intentionally so she too will feel the way he does. The script is based on an Alberto Moravia novel and this is a classic Moravia scenario. Moravia was fascinated with prostitutes and so was Godard -- ie My Life to Live. The husband and wife both feel like whores and so they feel contempt for themselves as well as each other. The husband wonders aloud why commerce must invade every aspect of our lives and by that he means both art and love but he seems powerless to win his wife back. Though the film began with the loving couple laying in bed and whispering to each other, it ends on quite a different note. Palance, Lang, and Piccoli all interpret Homers Odyssey in their own way. Each views the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope according to their own life situation. Palance and Piccoli cease to find the film all that interesting, they are only interested in the battle for Bardot. Lang alone remains focused on the actual film. For Lang the world of the Greeks is too far removed from our own experince of the world and so he reinvents the story so it will resonate with modern audiences and he does so by brilliantly quoting from select texts (Dante, Holderlein)and thus he tells the tale as if it were taking place in the world we know today--as Lang reimagines the tale each scene takes on new significance. And of course the way Lang thinks and works sounds a lot like the way Godard thinks and works. An excellent film which can be appreciated by Godard fans and a good place to start for those not familiar with Godard.
Rating: 
Summary: Self-Contempt
Review: Bring Me the Head of Fritz Lang? Contempt is about selling out to crass commercialism and money's pervasive influence on one's relationships. I don't know what led Godard to take on this project, but Contempt seems to express thru its main character what Godard's experience under Joseph Levine, the producer. The hero of the movie wants money and fame but also to maintain his integrity. The moral dynamic is similar to one in Wilder's Apartment. Hero's lack of control over his own art is paralled with his loss of control over his wife who goes to the highest bidder. To what extent this reflects the then relationship between Godard and Karina is anyone's guess, but watching Godard's Karina movies you sense that they were somehow not compatible, with Godard being too intellectual to keep up with the half-romantic schtick for much longer and Karina too womanly and sensual to have a meaningful role in future Godard projects. Ironically, if Godard indeed lost his touch with women, it would it had little to do with money and more with his increasingly intellectualized view of both humanity and art.
Rating:
Summary: Self-Contempt
Review: Bring Me the Head of Fritz Lang? Contempt is about selling out to crass commercialism and money's pervasive influence on one's relationships. I don't know what led Godard to take on this project, but Contempt seems to express thru its main character what Godard's experience under Joseph Levine, the producer. The hero of the movie wants money and fame but also to maintain his integrity. The moral dynamic is similar to one in Wilder's Apartment. Hero's lack of control over his own art is paralled with his loss of control over his wife who goes to the highest bidder. To what extent this reflects the then relationship between Godard and Karina is anyone's guess, but watching Godard's Karina movies you sense that they were somehow not compatible, with Godard being too intellectual to keep up with the half-romantic schtick for much longer and Karina too womanly and sensual to have a meaningful role in future Godard projects. Ironically, if Godard indeed lost his touch with women, it would it had little to do with money and more with his increasingly intellectualized view of both humanity and art.
Rating:
Summary: OUTSTANDING!
Review: Criterion does it again. A wonderful, fascinating 1963 film rescued from terrible, faded prints and murky video transfers and made to look - like Criterion's equally outstanding refurbishment of Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" - almost like a brand-new movie; as clean and as beautiful as I have ever seen it. Not everyone will "get" what Jean-Luc Godard is up to with "Contempt", and some will get it but still not care for it - fair enough. He never claimed to be making movies for every audience any more than he claimed to be making them for rarefied elites, nevertheless a broad spectrum of us do understand and appreciate his artistic project (of which this is one sublime outcome), and if you can suspend for two hours the narrow, conventional expectations Hollywood product has cultivated in many of us, that number may include you. Robert Stam's alternate-channel audio commentary provides many interesting insights regarding the significance and filmmaking innovations of "Contempt", along with superb analysis of the sources of the story (in Homer and recent Italian literature) and the performances, and some information regarding how the movie came to be cast and produced, which goes a long way toward explaining why Godard made the movie he eventually made. "Contempt" may be Godard's most "conventional" film, but then art is not only about innovation, but also about mastery. If the performances are not always so subtle they are nevertheless wonderfully nuanced, including that of the great director (and non-actor) Fritz Lang, and Brigitte Bardot - still at the apogee of her Gallic voluptuousness - reveals a depth unimagined by those quick to dismiss her bathtub sex kitten persona - not to mention, most of her legendarily beautiful naked body, in Technicolor and CinemaScope. It's as much about how things don't work in a relationship as it is about how they don't work (for the purposes of art) in the movie business, and is as relevant to both subjects today as forty years ago. The second disc supplements include interesting and enjoyable interviews (especially the conversation between Jean-Luc Godard and Fritz Lang), and a short subject about Bardot and the photographers who followed her around relentlessly ("Paparazzi") that's just fun. Disc two also features the perfect antidote to today's movie trailers that go on and on and spoil everything: the one for "Contempt" shows you images from the film but manages to reveal almost nothing about it! This was a home run, Criterion - thank you, thank you, thank you!
Rating:
Summary: did you know..
Review: did you know that the opening of this film by goddard was not in his original script? yes, the opening segment with the nude bardot and piccoli was added on after post-production because the studio threatened to shelve the entire film. the studio was outraged that goddard had 'misused' bardot by not showing any nude scenes. goddard compromised by having bardot shot nude in the opening segment, with piccoli reciting a farcical monologue focusing on the studio's obssession with bardot's naked features.
|
